Texhnolyze: Engineered Fallaxy
by Viburnum
Summary: Post Series The surface world is changing— among Shapes and creatures worse than them, Ichise fights on with various people, including Theoria. Then there is Utena, one of the Shifters and Ichise's new friend who is monitored by Organo's parent group, Prometheus. The empty age is filled with many forms of emptiness, both negations and hope... Ichise/OC


Phoenix 1: Hymen

It seems everything had been useless. What else could he do or say? There was a soft look at the filth that had been once everything he knew and addressed. Ironically, it seems this place was the dug grave of human ingenuity around the geographical area for the surface immediate to this place had buried away all the feelings necessary to live and merely had a physical manifestation.

_Had Ran been right...or, have we wanted, desperately wanted her to be right?_

That was the question he most thought about. Ran had been a fighter till the bitter end. Death came to her when she was made into a shape. Unlike the deluded masses Ran knew that being a shape was making your body into nothing more than an industrial machine. Kano's own philosophy was selfish for only he reached the "nirvana" of consciousness by mating with Lux. How can you mate with it anyway? All of it was stupid garbage but the assassination of Ran was the only "logical" thing Kano did. Ran would oppose outright the self cannibalization of the human spirit and mind thus she either joined or died.

There was no way she could join. Ran couldn't and he knew this because Ran and he were quite the same. It took him all this time to realize this but that young girl was very much like him and that is why they needed each other a lot more and understood each other without speaking much or by engaging in intensely wasteful actions.

For him losing his limbs had once seemed like the worst thing that could happen to him. As a fighter he felt crippled and useless. But now, after losing Ran he realized how foolish that sounded. That fallacy of a logic was akin to Kano's twisted thinking. A man is not merely his appendages; it is stamina and spirit that evokes a man and his true limb of support had been Ran all along.

Yes, he had hated the texhnolyze but...but he couldn't censor it...the equipment was a great facet of the reality of Lux and being with the gangs; graduating to the stupidness of it all had been Lux too. The destiny he wanted to change so feverishly could have been easily done by him just walking away with Ran. But he stayed in Lux and idiotically supported a doomed system. Maybe, he just wanted to see for himself how the other side lived. And yeah they were worse than the so called cretins. Too drugged by grandiloquent dreams and polished narcissistic dramas to actually _live._

Ran was the _only_ one there who had _lived_. And he had lived with _her_.

_Will it end now?_

_Just like that?_

The image of the flower had gone away. It has become a shape. Raffa is a form of shape. Now he understood. Ran stood selling the yearned apocalypse of Lux (how the people wanted it) hoping that one day people would just treat the flower as a flower and not just a source of something that they themselves, who had become machines of sloth, would not try to find. The flower was the key in a way.

Getting up he trudged unevenly into a place nearby which had some remnants of the flower. Picking one up he looked at it.

Soon he ate the white anomaly.

For a moment nothing happened. Then a hard ripple of pain flooded his body and he twisted and turned. Like a flower in a storm his limbs were of his own and not his own. Screaming and breathing as this odd twirl happened for five minutes stopping to be standing proper on both feet. The texhnolyze started again with a flicker like a flame and he realized that his body felt odd. A limbo of sorts but not totally. Soon, white petals covered the metallic parts of his arm and leg, those that had been exposed in the carnage. They looked like the flower. They could not be plucked but writhed as though they were feathery scales to his limbs.

"So, I too, in a way, have mated with Lux." But then, he smiled. Life wasn't over. There must be something other than shapes out there. And he was determined to find it.

With that a man, a human being. left the horrid graveyard of metal and silence. A living shadow amongst solid shapes. Life was waiting and God knew Ichise wanted that.

...Back in the Opera house, a young girl, with yellow eyes and long red hair came forward. Dressed in white and pink she smiled and picked up the head of Kano, "Bad boy…"

And into her abdomen she absorbed the head.


End file.
